In the final chapter of his book, Dawkins turns his attention away from biological evolution to cultural evolution and introduces another innovation to our thinking about human behavior. The new idea is the meme, the cultural analog to the gene. A meme is a unit of cultural behavior, just as a gene is a unit of biological behavior. Examples of memes are ideas, customs, slogans, fashions in dress or in hair-style, skills, tools, laws, religious beliefs and political institutions. Memes spread through human populations by social contact far more rapidly than genes spread by sexual contact. Just as our behavior at the individual level is controlled by selfish genes, our behavior at the social level is controlled by selfish memes.

I am not afraid of Charlie because he writes extreme, offensive things online. I am afraid of him because I recognize so many of his proclivities in regular people—the shifting eyes, the formless references and mental absence. If you spend all of your time consuming internet culture, you are consuming stories and myths and personalities that only exist online. To curate your online presence is to give up a piece of your physical self, to live in a simulated universe of your own creation. 

But there are hundreds of online communities with their own rules, their own norms, their own Charlies—extremely online people buzzing behind the screen.

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which have recently become umbrella terms referring to any piece of quickly-consumed comedic or relatable content

It looks like a real book!

Besides, the Anthropocene has already become another‘Anthropomeme’ (Macfarlane, 2016), spawning an array of derivativeterms, such as ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore, 2015), ‘Anthrop-obscene’(Parikka, 2015b), but also: ‘Plasticene’, ‘Plantationocene’ (Tsing, 2015),‘Mis-anthropocene’ and ‘Chthulucene’ (Haraway, 2015).

Before the Internet,

Who do children identify with? Superman? Spiderman? Ironman? Barbie? Gandhi?

during the week we had students reading my blog, seeing their snow hat from last winter being commented on by people all around the world and retweeted by Rihanna (a robot - I kept that quiet not to spoil the effect) on Twitter.

Definition

Summer surprised us

Let me be very clear: I do not care what the “top highlight” is. In fact, I actively do not want to know what the top highlight is. That kind of information encourages the meme-ification of the web, a world where we care more about pushing one sentence over the “tipping point” into virality than in carrying on a global conversation. It’s American Idol for pull quotes.

For without knowing the names of any of the faults, they will, from being accustomed to correct speech, lay hold upon whatever is faulty in the speech of any one they listen to, and avoid it; just as city-bred men, even when illiterate, seize upon the faults of rustics.